A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience.

Download our PowerPoint presentation about the relativistic effects in the game: PPTPPTX

OpenRelativity

A Slower Speed of Light was created using OpenRelativity, an open-source toolkit for the Unity game development environment. Intended for game developers, educators, and anyone interested in physics, OpenRelativity can help people create, test, and share experiments to explore the effects of special relativity.

Requirements

A Slower Speed of Light has been tested on computers with the configurations listed below.

Technical Support and Bug Reports

Some users have reported that the game may run on Windows XP and 2GB RAM. A known bug will crash the game on computers with some Intel graphics chipsets (the beta version might fix this issue).

To run the game, Windows users with multiple graphics processors may need to right-click the game’s application icon, select ‘Run with graphics processor,’ and choose the option that is not marked as the default.

To start the game on Linux in a different screen resolution, use one of the following options from the command line inside the game folder, replacing screenwidth and screenheight with your width and height of your screen in pixels: